Following a site-specific dance performance, Kayvon Pourazar and Michelle Boulé spoke with Triple Canopy senior editor Lara Mimosa Montes. They discussed their experiences as collaborators and improvisers, their desire to unsettle “the brain-body hierarchy,” and their efforts to imagine “blueprints toward healing.” Sound design was provided by the performers with contributions from Curtis Tamm.
Can’t make it to either night? Live-stream the first performance here.
If Our Bodies Are Beyond Logic is a two-night dance performance by Michelle Boulé and Kayvon Pourazar—a site-specific incarnation of The Field, Boulé’s ongoing research project. This work integrates Boulé and Pourazar’s extensive backgrounds in healing practices, dance, and performance. They experiment with the ways in which bodies can, through movement and improvisation, let go of a certain kind of knowing in order to cultivate a new and emergent relationship to freedom, transformation, resonance, and form. Much as in a healing practice, the performers open themselves to the somatic currents of energy exchanged between one another, rather than direct, correct, or choreograph these currents. Sound design was provided by the performers with contributions from Curtis Tamm.
The performance will be followed by a conversation with Triple Canopy senior editor Lara Mimosa Montes and Boulé and Pourazar about how performance can refuse the brain-body hierarchy and instead embrace what is fluid, intuitive, undecided, and beyond logic. How, as performers, choreographers, and mutually entangled presences, can we attend to energy and its relationship to form? How can we find the freedom necessary to create an aesthetic that is in touch with our present, our histories, and our possible futures?
If Our Bodies Are Beyond Logic is part of Risk Pool, an issue that asks: how are sickness and wellness defined, and by whom? What are the effects of these definitions, these acts of naming and describing?
This is a standing-room-only event. (A limited number of seats will be available, with priority for those with accessibility needs.) Please note that entry is on a first-come, first-served basis. In order to ensure that events are accessible and comfortable, we’ll open the doors at 6:30 p.m. and strictly limit admittance to our legal capacity. Please check Triple Canopy’s Facebook and Twitter accounts for updates, as we’ll indicate if events are sold out.
Triple Canopy’s venue is located at 264 Canal Street, 3W, near several Canal Street subway stations. Our floor is accessible by elevator (63" × 60" car, 31" door) and stairway. Due to the age and other characteristics of the building, our bathrooms are not ADA-accessible, though several such bathrooms are located nearby. If you have specific questions about access, please write at least three days before the event and we will make every effort to accommodate you.
- Michelle Boulé is a Bessie Award-winning choreographer, performer, teacher, and certified BodyTalk practitioner based in Brooklyn, New York. Her choreographic work has been commissioned and presented by the Chocolate Factory, Danspace Project, the Met Breuer (with Okkyung Lee), River to River Festival, American Realness, Issue Project Room, Mount Tremper Arts Festival, Dance and Process at the Kitchen, Movement Research at Judson Church, and Center for Performance Research. She recently has received awards such as the NYFA Choreography Fellowship and Distinguished Legacy Award from the University of Illinois, and been a resident at MacDowell, Yaddo, and Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. As a performer, she has worked with Miguel Gutierrez, Bebe Miller, Deborah Hay, and John Jasperse, among others. She has been a visiting faculty member at Hollins University and the University of Illinois, as well as a guest teacher at dance institutions throughout North and South America, Europe, Australia, and Asia. She currently is part of the teaching faculty at Movement Research and the New School/Eugene Lang College in New York. As a BodyTalk Practitioner, she has, for the past ten years, maintained a private clinical practice in New York and an online practice at MBodyRadiance.com.
- Kayvon Pourazar is of Persian origin and spent his formative years in Iran, Turkey, and England. In 1995, he immigrated to the US. He graduated with a BFA in dance from SUNY Purchase in 2000 and has resided in New York City ever since. He has performed in the works of Heather Kravas, Juliana May, Juliette Mapp, Yasuko Yokoshi, Donna Uchizono, Gwen Welliver, Beth Gill, RoseAnne Spradlin, K. J. Holmes, John Jasperse, Levi Gonzalez, Doug Varone, Wil Swanson, Gabriel Masson, Jennifer Monson, and Jodi Melnick, as well as in the Metropolitan Opera productions of Les Troyens and Le Sacre du printemps. Pourazar’s rare ventures into making work have been shown in New York City at the Kitchen, PS 122, Cunningham Studios, Roulette, Center for Performance Research, Catch, AUNTS, and Dixon Place, as well as at the University of Nebraska, the University of Vermont and Sacramento State. In 2010, he received a New York Dance and Performance Bessie Award for Performance. He has served as adjunct faculty at Bennington College and currently teaches at the New School. He also teaches regularly for Movement Research and has taught as guest artist for Tsekh Russia (Moscow) and Workshop Foundation (Budapest).